When privacy teams up with genetic or employment anti-discrimination laws, it is invoked to defeat freedom of contract, not to support it. Far from extending the perimeter of one's person outward in ways consistent with the like liberty of others, it allows one group of individuals to deceive another, and through that deception to take the wealth of others. The tacit principle at work here is that undeniable cases of individual need justify theft from other individuals.

The better approach, by far, is to put aside the mantra of privacy altogether and ask one simple question: To what extent should healthy people be forced to subsidize the health care of their less-fortunate fellow citizens? Once that question is determined in an open and public debate, then we can use a transparent, on-budget tax expenditure to pick up all or some of the cost.

WORKERS NEED A NEW CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT TO PROTECT THEIR PRIVACY

Barbara Ehrenreich; The New York Times, March 5, 2000, SECTION: Section 6; Page 88; TITLE: Warning: This Is a Rights-Free Workplace // acs-VT2001

What we need is nothing less than a new civil rights movement -- this time, for American workers. Who will provide the leadership remains to be seen, but clearly the stakes go way beyond "labor issues," as these are conventionally defined. We can hardly call ourselves the world's pre-eminent democracy if large numbers of citizens spend half of their waking hours in what amounts, in plain terms, to a dictatorship.